1,721,016 research outputs found
The Impact of Religious Bias on Mental Health and Academic Performance: Implications for Diversity in Academia and Science Fields
Full text linkScience thrives when there is a continuous flow of new ideas and diverse generations of scholars contributing to the field. Although academic institutions aim to encourage diverse viewpoints, a culture of atheism among university faculties may unwittingly be contributing to an anti-religious atmosphere. The main focus of this dissertation is to investigate people’s attitudes toward religious individuals, and how these attitudes affect the religious believers’ mental health and academic performance. Study 1 (N = 899) found that people tend to explicitly report that religious believers have lower intelligence, but to implicitly associate them with higher intelligence. Although this is the case, faculty members, particularly those from secular institutions, did not have this implicit association and had the strongest congruity between their explicit and implicit intelligence preferences. Studies 2-3 showed that religious believers of diverse backgrounds reported experiencing overt and covert forms of religious bias, including biases related to their academic ability. Religious believers reported that they encountered more incidences of overt and covert forms of religious bias inside of higher education than outside of academia. Experiences of religious microaggressions significantly predicted higher rates of depression in Study 2 (N = 383) and marginally in Study 3 (N = 129).
Finally, Study 4 (N = 169) found that compared to other religious groups, Christians were stereotyped to lack science competency. Study 5 (N = 237) demonstrated that these stereotypes applied to Christian college students and was at a comparable rate to how women are stereotyped to lack scientific competency and interest. Study 6 (N = 93) demonstrated that these negative stereotypes cause Christian college students to become less interested in and identify less with sciences. They also caused Christian college students to underperform on science-relevant tasks, especially those students with a stronger religious identity (Study 7; N = 90). These studies reveal that stereotypes play a key role in pushing religious believers out of science. Implications and future directions in the representation of religious believers in academia and science fields are discussed.
This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material.2021-01-1
Violation of Sacredness and Violence
Full text linkThis dissertation aims to present a model of sacredness – MAPR – that emphasizes four components to empirically study sacredness: source of meaning (M), experience of awe (A), protection against the profane (P), and relationship to religion (R). The empirical studies focus on the psychological mechanisms of protecting, and examine the association of violence and violation of sacredness.
Five studies examined the hypothesized effect of violating sacredness on moral judgment and support for war. Hypothetical and semi-real scenarios were created in which a sacred site (versus a military site) is attacked and participants report the degree to which they support war as counterattack. Results showed no effects of sacredness in eliciting violence (Study 1). The proposed effect did not show either with fine-tuned aspects of sacredness: religious sacredness and ethnonational sacredness (Study 2), or under feeling prime (Study 3). This effect did not show with an Iranian sample either (Study 4).
To address possible methodological challenges, we checked the manipulation scenarios by changing the non-sacred condition into a manufacture plant (previously a military site). The null results remained unchallenged (Study 5a). We also examined individuals’ attitudes toward attacking the sacred site in Study 2, and counterattacking for the sacred site in Study 3. In addition, some personality variables were included to index the characteristics of individuals who support protecting the sacredness. No clear pattern was observed.
The results suggest the possibility that the connection of sacredness and violence may be a misconception. The null finding has significant implications in today’s tumultuous world, where dialogue is needed between different faith communities, and terrorism can and should be distinguished from religious commitment
Holy day effects on language: How religious geography, individual affiliation and day of the week relate to sentiment and topics on Twitter
Full text linkReligious belief and attendance predict improved well-being at the individual level. Paradoxically, geographic locations with high rates of religious belief and attendance are often those with the differentially high rates of societal instability and suffering. Many of the consequences of religiosity are context-based and vary across time, and holy days are naturally-occurring religious cues that have been shown to influence religiously-relevant attitudes and behaviors. I investigated the degree to which personal religiosity and religious geography (i.e. religious demographics with other location variables) individually and interactively predict well-being across days of the week.
In the first study, American Christians demonstrated greater well-being by expressing more positive sentiment in Twitter posts, while American Muslims displayed less well-being. Sundays were generally the most positive day, but American Muslims communicated more happiness on Fridays (the Muslim holy day). In the second study, Christianity did not predict increased well-being in the posts of college students. In the third study, global survey data with measures of religiosity and well-being indicated that the well-being consequences of religious affiliation depend on the religious group and location, and that people tend to be especially positive on their group’s holy day. Study four explored the latent topical content of Twitter posts. Across studies, religious minority status appeared to have a deleterious effect on well-being
Believe what you will : everyday ethics of belief support motivated reasoning
No full textRationality requires unbiased reasoning to produce accurate beliefs, but people appear routinely biased towards believing what they want, even if inaccurate (i.e., motivated reasoning). What makes motivated reasoning so common if it is so irrational? Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that people are committed to empiricism and unanimously disapprove of motivated reasoning, and that therefore motivated reasoning must happen unconsciously. A newer perspective tries to dissolve the issue by arguing that we can reinterpret many apparent cases of “motivated” reasoning as rational Bayesian cognition. This perspective argues that it is perfectly reasonable to treat a new piece of information with more scrutiny if it contradicts a large body of prior evidence, and thus when we observe people being more skeptical of information they disagree with, they are not necessarily being unreasonably “motivated”. In my dissertation, I will challenge both of these views: The first four studies challenge the Bayesian alternative, showing that people are not only skeptical of high quality information that challenges their preferred beliefs, but also willing to elevate low quality information (e.g., anecdotes, a single non-expert’s opinion) to the status of evidence when they are favorable to their preferred beliefs. The next four studies challenge the view that people universally disapprove of motivated reasoning by directly asking them about their ethics of belief: these studies reveal that many people actually approve of social, emotional, and especially moral goals guiding their empirical reasoning in addition to accuracy. Moreover, people acted in line with what they reported approving of: Participants who disapproved of social and emotional bias did not show signs of a self-serving bias, while approvers of social and emotional bias did. A final pair of experiments finds that even empiricist participants selectively elevate anecdotes to the status of evidence when given a moral motive.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat
Only believers rely on God? A new measure to investigate catholic faith automatic associations and their relationship with psychological well-being
No full textRecent theorists have argued that theistic cognitions are so deeply embedded in human cultures that nearly all people experience implicit religious thoughts, even those who consider themselves as atheists or agnostics. This study aimed to evaluate the validity of a Catholic Faith Single Category Implicit Association Test (CF SC-IAT; Karpinski & Steinman, 2006), the degree of implicit- explicit dissociation across different religious groups (practicing and nonpracticing Catholics, agnostics and atheists), as well as the relationships between automatic faith associations and well-being indices. The study was conducted using a Roman sample composed of 142 subjects (106 women) who were an average of 24.74 years of age (SD = 10.66). Results showed: (a) an adequate level of reliability and convergent and criterion validity; (b) a certain degree of implicit- explicit dissociation in terms of a different localization of mean scores with respect to the neutral scale point, a different pattern of means across the religious groups, a small correlation between them, and independent contributions in the prediction of religionrelated behaviors; and (c) significant correlations between implicit Catholic faith and 3 different indices of psychological well-being. Theoretical interpretations and limitations of the study were discussed
The role of group-based moral pride in regulating guilt and shame for intergroup transgressions
No full textWhen people from advantaged groups are confronted with information about their group’s immoral actions, they tend to respond with different group-based self-conscious emotions. Group-based guilt and moral shame are associated with intergroup reparation intentions, whereas image shame for the ingroup’s tarnished reputation leads members to avoid reconciliation. We introduce and test a model for how group-based moral pride regulates these different reactions to the ingroup’s transgressions. Across Studies 1-2, Canadians high on authentic group-based moral pride (AGMP), which entails genuine and grounded feelings of moral accomplishment, experienced higher levels of guilt and moral shame for Canada’s genocide of Indigenous people. Conversely, people high on hubristic group-based moral pride (HGMP), an inflated sense of moral superiority, experienced higher levels of image shame. Group-based moral shame accounted for a positive indirect association between AGMP and support for reparations, whereas image shame accounted for a positive indirect association between HGMP and avoidance intentions. In Study 3, we show that these divergent associations between each facet of group-based moral pride and guilt/moral shame are explained by defensive appraisals of an ingroup moral threat. In Studies 4-5, manipulated feelings of AGMP causally increased group-based guilt and moral shame, and these effects were found among both non-Indigenous Canadians (Study 4) and White Americans (Study 5). Group-based moral shame, in turn, mediated the effects of manipulated AGMP on increased support for reparations and decreased support for avoidance. These results contribute to a theoretical understanding of how self-conscious emotions regulate one another to influence intergroup relations.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Cultural change fast and slow : a novel measure of the speed of cultural change
No full textWhat cross-national patterns of variation in the speed of cultural change exist? And what
explains this variation? Prior research on cultural change has tended to focus on describing and
explaining changes along narrow dimensions of culture, while leaving these questions about
broader patterns of cultural change unaddressed. Due to this dimension-focused approach,
cultural psychology has yet to develop any adequate methods for measuring cross-national
variation in the speed of cultural change. To address the gap in the literature, we repurpose
statistical tools conventionally used to measure cross-national cultural distance and develop an
index measuring country-level rates of cultural change over the last 20 years: the cultural change
index. We present our approach to building this index and provide an analysis of its statistical
properties and robustness. We perform exploratory analyses that examine the correlation between
the cultural change index and a wide range of variables that prior research has identified as
potentially having a causal impact on the speed of cultural change. We find correlations with the
cultural change index across five classes of predictor variables— socioeconomic development,
globalization, gender equality, cultural orientations, and ecological factors. To conclude, we
discuss limitations of the present research and make recommendations for how future research
on this topic can build upon our measurement techniques and analytical approaches.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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